German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called for strict data protection rules and transparency from Internet firms including Google and Facebook all through the European Union, amidst reports of US online snooping. Merkel urged that Germany require all the European firms to furnish details on who they are offering data to. German pubilc broadcaster ARD cited Merkel as saying "I expect a clear commitment from the US government that in future they will stick to German law."

Facebook posts are viewed by three times as many people as users believe, thedrum.com reports. New research from Stanford University found that Facebook users often underestimate the number of people who end up viewing each of their posts. In fact, the real number of eyes the messages fall on is often three times what people expect. The results, which were published in Stanford's 'Quantifying the Invisible Audience in Social Networks' report, were gleaned from a study of 22,000 Facebook users.

With the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's first child imminent, British magazine Future is hoping to capitalise with a commemorative app for iPhone and iPad. Royal Baby App: Kate and William's Birth Celebration was released on the App Store on Friday (13 June), as speculation increased about the due date for the birth. The app is a free download, but sells individual sections - Royal Baby Special 1, Royal Babies, Meet Dad, and Will & Kate - as 69p in-app purchases, taking advantage of an increasingly-popular business model on iOS.

Electronics and beer aren't always cosy bedfellows but that hasn't stopped BT Sport from devising a hi-tech solution for the humble beer mat. The custom built mats can be scanned by smartphones equipped with Blippar technology to allow patrons of BT Sports screening clubs and pubs to vote on sporting issues, research game stats, enter competitions and share content via social media.

About 41% of consumers were not able to recognise the top listed Adwords were paid-for placed adverts, and considered them to be the most reliable and accurate results, according to a new report. According to the report from Bunnyfoot, 81% of web users clicked on Google Adwords rather than general search results, with only 19% scrolling down for the organic returned matches. Another report from GroupM UK revealed that women are likely to click on paid search returns compared to men.

Wuaki.tv, the streaming video service owned by Japanese retail giant Rakuten, has expanded from Spain to the U.K., where it hopes to be a competitor to Amazon's Lovefilm and Netflix. Wuaki was founded in Barcelona in 2009 and acquired by Rakuten last year. It says it has over 600,000 subscribers in Spain. The company didn't share the total number of titles available, but says it has content from major Hollywood studios like Warner Bros., Disney, Sony and 21st Century Fox, as well as "major UK and international distributors" like the BBC.

Specialist publisher Future has ditched the title of publisher and instead created a series of new business heads to run various part of the company. There have been no redundancies as a result of the recent shake-up, although games division publisher Richard Keith left the business before it took place. Future chief executive Mark Wood said: "'Publisher' is an outmoded job title for what is required of our business heads now. These changes reflect our re-positioning away from a platform-focused structure to a more audience-based approach.

Twitter, which has assiduously branded itself as an advocate of free speech, has agreed to identify several users who posted anti-Semitic comments on its service, and whom French authorities are seeking to prosecute for violating that country's anti-hate laws. The case shows how challenging it is for Silicon Valley companies to champion the free speech rights of users while complying with the laws of countries where they do business. It also highlights Silicon Valley's Europe problem: the Continent represents a large and lucrative market, but its lawmakers, regulators and courts have hounded the industry in recent months on issues as …

Twitter is not set to replace traditional newswires as a source for breaking news, researchers have found. Academics from the University of Edinburgh and University of Glasgow examined 27 high-profile news events in 2011, researchers discovered that newswires broke the news first 15 times, with Twitter leading eight times and a further four events covered almost simultaneously.

The Weather Channel is expanding its European footprint in the smart TV space with the initial launch of its smart TV app on LG smart TVs, before a further roll-out across the region. The Weather Channel app features live TV streams, weather forecasts, severe weather reports, latest videos and user-generated content within a live weather condition-themed interface.